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Bridging firewalls for ADSL Connections

For a long time I’ve had the 56k (hah – If I’m lucky) dialup. Between the modem and my local network was a nice Linux firewall, all was good. Then I changed my connection to ADSL from [Internode][], that was good too. I soon found out that I couldn’t put my firewall in as-is, that was bad.

##Why Bridging?
The problem is that, like a lot of other DSL networks out there, [Internode][] sees your LAN and their network device at the telephone exchange like its one big Ethernet LAN. Normal firewalls expect two different blocks of IP addresses (or subnets) on their “outside” and “inside” interfaces, eg network number 10 on the inside and 42 on the outside. The problem is with the given setup, network 42 is both on the outside and inside, a real problem for a standard firewall.

A bridging firewall expects all its interfaces on the same network. It looks a lot like an Ethernet switch or a hub and in-fact with no firewall rules it behaves exactly like that. The tricky thing is that it has to act like a switch when passing packets but act like a router when its deciding if it should be passing that packet at all.

It should be mentioned that you only need a bridging firewall when you want the computers on your local network to all have real live addresses (so no NAT) and your ISP is not expecting you to have a router there.

##Kernel Patches and changes
The standard Linux kernel has firewalling in it, it also has bridging code, so we’re set right? That depends on what version kernel you have. For 2.4.x kernels you need a patch, but the newer 2.6.x kernels have ebtables (which is the project that swallowed up the iptables+bridge code) so no patching is needed.

I a 2.4.x kernel, the bridge code needs a modification so it goes and “asks” the firewall code if it is OK to forward a packet. Without that patch, your bridge code will happily send any packets that come along.

##Compiling 2.4.x kernels

Now it used to be quite easy as there was only one source of the firewall-bridge linking code. However the code used to sit with the bridge project at sourceforge but has now moved in with the ebtables project also at sourceforge. The following table may make it easier to understand what patch you need

Kernel version

Patch

2.4.18

bridge-nf-0.0.7-against-2.4.18.diff

2.4.21

ebtables-brnf-3_vs_2.4.21.diff.gz

2.4.22

ebtables-brnf-2_vs_2.4.22.diff.gz

The 2.4.21 kernel patch didn’t work cleanly and I needed to manually fix a few files to get it to patch and compile, the good news is the 2.4.22 kernel patch did work cleanly for a stock 2.4.22 kernel.

* net/Makefile : Add “bridge/netfilter” to the mod-subdirs line
* net/ipv4/ip_output.c : Add 4 lines from the rej file. Note that in the last file the pointer handle “skb2” is now called “to” and “skb” is called “from” so make sure you make those adjustments when you do your hand-patching.
* net/bridge/br_netfilter.c : Uses old route table functions and a structure that doesnt have pmtu any more. Use the patch at .

You probably should also read the documentation with respect to the different patches. Earlier patches have their Bridge document Page while the newer patches are a poorer cousin to ebtables itself on the newer site but you might dredge up something on the ebtables dcoumentation page

For compiling, I enabled bridging, netfilter, iptables and the bridge netfilter support. The kernel compiled fine and I then installed it on the firewall.

##Compiling 2.6.x kernels
At the time of this writing, I was unable to use the physdev feature of iptables, which means the bridging firewall was unable to use iptables where the physical interface needed to be specified, iptables gave an invalid argument every time I used -m physdev, I rolled back to kernel 2.4.22.

As previously mentioned, the 2.6.x kernels have ebtables built in, so there is no need for patching. ebtables used to be just for filtering based on layer-2 information, such as ethernet MAC addresses but it now allows the Linux bridge to look at the same things ipfilter can see. Some 2.6 kernel and iptables setups cannot handle the physdev module, so you might need ebtables anyway.

There’s two ways of filtering IP packets in 2.6 kernels. You can use ipfilters which can see bridged packets and you can use ebtables which has some limited support of IP. Unless there is a good reason, go with the iptables, it has a lot more features for IP packets.

For compiling, I enabled bridging, netfilter, iptables and iptables physdev. If you want ebtables support too enable , ebtables, ebt: filter table, ebt: log support and ebt: IP filter support. These are found in the networking options submenu of the kernel configuration.

##Helper Programs
You will need two helper programs for your firewall. They both don’t need patching which is wonderful! The first is iptables for manipulating the firewall rules and the second is bridge-utils which makes the bridges. If you want to use ebtables too, get it as well.

I run the Debian distribution so to download the two required packages was a matter of a apt-get command and I was done. If you don’t run Debian I’m sure you’ll find the programs for your distribution somewhere.

##Configuration
It’s remarkably simple to make a bridging firewall. You make the bridge, then you add firewall rules in. I was pleasantly surprised by this; the hardest thing for me was to get a second Ethernet card working in my stupid hardware that has flakey ISA buses and a PCI slot that makes anything in it misbehave, luckily I had 3 other sensible PCI slots.

That was it, one working bridge! This meant that any packets that needed to cross the bridge were allowed through. Next I had to add some firewall rules in. What to put into a firewall is explained much better elsewhere, look at the iptables reference given above.

The way the interfaces are handled changes in the kernels. For 2.4 kernels, you use the standard iptables input and output (-i and -o ) flags to specify what your incoming and outgoing interfaces should be. For 2.6 kernels you need to use the physical device module. So whever you see a rule that has -i or -o flags, replace them with -m physdev –physdev-in or -m physdev –physdev-out to specify which interface you want (this is what breaks on my system). If you use -i and -o it will mis-match because iptables thinks the input and output interfaces are whatever you call the bridge (br0 if you use my example).

Pretty simple stuff. I hope it was helpful for you. If there is a part that doesn’t make any sense or you’d like me to explain it better drop me a line at the address below.
Very simple iptables rules example

Here is a very simple example of iptables ruleset. It won’t do very much except allow everyone from the inside network to connect and for the reply packets to come back. It’s based on Rusty’s quick example. It assumes your external interface is eth0. First is the 2.4 kernel example:

##NATing on a Bridging Firewall
It may seem strange that if you have a bridging firewall, why would you use NAT and in fact how can you use it. The answer is you may have several IP address but more computers. Put the servers into the DMZ with real addresses and NAT the PCs.

The setup I have has the hosts with the real and private addresses on the same physical network. This is generally a bad idea and is called multi-netting. If you can, put the private hosts on a third ethernet card.

With multi-netting, you get the bizzare situation where everything revolves around a single interface and the firewall is part bridge, part router, based on what IP address it sees.

The first thing to do is give the bridge interface (br0 in the example) two IP addresses. It needs to be in both the public and private networks to do the routing and NATing. If you are going the three interface method, the third interface gets the private address and the bridge interface gets the public one.

Next, you need to add some firewall rules to do the NAT itself. This is reasonably standard. You will need to qualify the rule with the private LAN address so you don’t NAT the public IP addresses too. The example assumes the external IP address is 1.2.3.4

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.1.0/24 --to 1.2.3.4

Finally protect your firewall, it now unfortunately has a public IP address so it can do NAT. You may want to make sure that your daemons, such as SSH, only listen to your private IP addresses. Also some firewall rules such as the following can help. Other than traffic already established, the firewall only accepts traffic to itself if it is from the private LAN IP range and it came from the internal interface and it is destined to the firewall itself. It also accepts traffic on the loopback interface but drops the rest.